Jack Reacher, in his 20th adventure, gets off a train in the middle of the night in a little town called Mother's Rest, curious only about the origin of its name. But he's drawn into a much deeper mystery after he meets Michelle Chang, a private investigator looking for a missing colleague whose last known location was Mother's Rest. The investigation leads Reacher and Chang to Los Angeles, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco, ending up back in Mother's Rest in an explosive confrontation.
Lee Child's Make Me delivers on the elements Reacher fans have come to love--fight scenes in which Reacher is outmanned but somehow manages to whomp his opponents, his teaming up with an attractive female partner, his witty observations: "Pharmacy windows were a marketing challenge, in Reacher's opinion. It was hard to think of a display liable to make people rush inside with enthusiasm." Mother's Rest denizens aren't given names but identifiers such as the guy "who had gotten kicked in the balls" and "the man with the jeans and the hair."
But Make Me also delves into the series' darkest subject matter in recent memory. Just when the story seems to have taken a grim turn, it twists again into pitch-black territory. There are moments when Reacher and Chang make inexplicable mistakes, and she comes across more like a rookie than a former FBI special agent when she repeatedly asks him, "How do we do this?" before they take action, but that doesn't take away from the novel's haunting aftereffect. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd